Theatre Review: "The Swan" Trap Door Theatre

On Saturday night, I saw the play "The Swan" staged at the Trap Door Theatre. It was a modest play featuring really only leading role, Dora, who on occasion argues with her lover, Kevin, a strapping milkman, who is married, and claims with bluster he can support two women, and Bill, a man who believes he is a bird, who for much of the play cannot talk, and then talks in bursts at times or parrots others speech. The elaborate and well designed set of the play is a ramshackle house interior with a large, partly broken window, which figures importantly as a symbol in the play.

The casting is appropriate: Dora is played by a young woman who projects naivety and disorientation, always involved in relations that are spinning out of control, Kevin, by a strapping young man who is pleasant and overbearing, who often seems on the verge of losing his temper, and the swan, by a physically much smaller and shorter man, who convincingly plays the part of a man with limited faculties. Throughout the production some popular rock oldies play in the background, as well as on a few occasions we hear the sound of beating wings. If you come to the play early, you will see Dora moping around on stage, trying to sleep, obviously looking troubled. This is a standard feature pre-opening feature at the Trap Door: actors moving around on the set, usually silently.

Just who or what is Bill is--man or bird, or man-bird, or a man suffering from the delusion that he is a bird--is left indeterminate, so he is a postmodernist character, who most importantly also serves as a mirror or projection of Dora's own desires to find a man who she can love, for she can't seem to hold on to the three previous ones who she meets. What better way to meet the next one than if he comes crashing through her window. Initially, Dora is on the verge of shooting Bill, but gradually comes to see him as vulnerable, hurt, needy and even as a man (or bird-man?) willing to return her affection.

Tim Burton's film "Edward Scissorhands" (1990) immediately came to mind--a naive, otherwordly, and different and seemingly not entirely human being comes to town, and predictably ruffles feathers. (Checking a reference, I see that Egloff first produced her play in 1989, before the Burton film was released.) The other avian plays that come to my mind which use genuine birds as their symbolic centers and plot hinge points are Chekhov's, "The Seagull", and Ibsen's "Wild Ducks."

While Burton's film is a more accessible and sentimental production, Egloff's is darker, since Dora is herself is clearly a troubled young woman, who keeps making bad choices in life. The fact that she allows herself to become a mistress to the milkman, Kevin, is already a sign that though she seems a good person, she lacks the discernment to claim what she deserves--a better man and relationship. She gradually, however, begins to realize this when she begins nursing for and caring for the bird-man Bill; inevitably, she becomes attracted to the bird man, and a conflict results with Kevin milkman. I'll leave it at that.

The play has some flashes of humor, passages of eloquent, poetic language, and raw, unnerving expression of need and desire by the bird-man Bill; the last seemed too overindulged to me and made me squirm in my seat the way that babies do who won't stop crying. Also, Dora, is a difficult character to empathize with because she seems so lost and misguided, though at the end of the play there is a hint however forlorn, she attains some tragic insight. Overall, it's a well done production by talented young actors who work for free and experience in Chicago's semi-professional/amateur theatre scene.

For more text see comments; the photo is of Man Ray's oil painting, Leda and the Swan, 1941.

http://www.trapdoortheatre.com/trapdoor/page.cfm?id=1